Amazon has extended the free introductory period for GameOn, its cross-platform, competitive gaming service, built on the AWS cloud infrastructure, that allows developers to create competitions within their games until June 1st.

As we reported when it launched in March, Amazon GameOn is intended to gives developers tools to drive engagement, increase monetization, and attract more players to their games.

The GameOn APIs lets you add leaderboards, leagues, and multi-round competitions to games on any genre which helps build community around games and increase their appeal. As GameOn is built on AWS it works on any operating system and gives developers the ability to scale quickly.

As Reggie Martin explains on the Amazon Appstore blog:

Leaderboards work particularly well for single-player games like endless runners, match-3, racing, sports, shooters, and puzzle games. For multiplayer games, on the other hand, leagues are very popular. Rather than ranking players on a high score or best time, league players are ranked on number of wins. Either approach can be combined into multiple rounds, where only the top finishers in one tournament advance to the next.

Eden Games was one of the companies with early access to GameOn prior to its launch and used it to scale the size of the competitions they run in Gear.Club. According to the companies CMO Pascal Clarysse:

“GameOn has made it easy for us to add leaderboards and tournaments in-game ... saved us months of development and a whole lot of maintenance and logistical overhead in the long run.”

GameOn also supports user-generated competitions, so your players can create tournaments of their own inside your game. Users can invite their friends and family to compete, and GameOn will handle all the details, managing matches and score-keeping just the same as for the "official" tournaments you create.

As Reggie Martin puts it:

This is a great way for your influencers and streamers to engage directly with their followers, which encourages them to spread the word and helps fuel your fan base. Let your players help you promote.

Getting started with GameOn is easy and some developers have been able to incorporate competitions in their game with GameOn in as little as one day. You first need to obtain an API key by signing in with your Amazon Developer credentials. If you don't already have an account, registration is easy and free. Next you register your game in the Game Settings tab and then follow the on-screen prompts to integrate the APIs.

Extending introductory offers is sometimes a sign that take-up hasn't been as fast as hoped for, but if that's the case all the more reason to join in now and start adding competitive features to existing games. The GameOn APIs are now free until June 1, 2018. After that date, the first 35,000 plays per month are free for a limited time, then developers will pay $0.003 per play.

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